


the witch in the wood

by xsprinkledheart



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Canon Backstory, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 08:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19353655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xsprinkledheart/pseuds/xsprinkledheart
Summary: Kyoko used to believe in fairy tales.





	the witch in the wood

Anyone who’s met Kyoko Sakura knows that she lives vicariously through books.

She’s only seven years old, but there she is - book in tow as she hides behind her mother crossing the street, picture book propped up on her lap as she reads out on the front porch till her parents call her in for dinner, forehead pressed against her desk as she devours the words on the pages she flips through in secret; she’s trying to evade the eagle eyes of her teacher. Her parents get her books for birthday presents, she spends her carefully saved allowance on them, always wheedles and begs and pleads for a trip to the library to happen on the weekend.

Kyoko likes it when her parents read to her the most, though. Sometimes when he is not too weighed down by paperwork and services her father will read her a bedtime story, but it’s usually her mother that reads her and her little sister Momo fairytales. The book with the fairytales is dog-eared with yellowed pages and a cover that might fall apart any second, but Kyoko likes listening to her mother’s soft voice read the words off the page before she goes to sleep.

“And then after they found that the shoe fit, the prince married Cinderella and they lived happily ever after.” Kyoko’s mother closes the book.

“Yay,” Kyoko says. Her voice is slurred with tiredness, and she feels an incoming yawn coming.   
“Can you read us another story?” Momo asks. She’s curled up and cradling an oversized teddy bear.

“It’s already past bedtime, and you have school tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night?”

Her mother smiles, fingers combing through her daughter’s untidy bangs. “Of course, Momo. Good night, you two.”

She quietly leads Momo in their prayers before their mother leaves, and then the light’s turned out.

Kyoko lies awake for a moment in the darkness of her room. The air conditioner hums with cool air - a relief from summer’s haze of heat. Momo mumbles a little in her sleep, burrowing closer towards her beloved teddy bear. Kyoko closes her eyes to the dark blue and black shadows cast across the room, curling up on her side to fall into dreams of glass slippers and dashing princes and lavish ballrooms and happy endings.

* * *

What little food they have isn’t enough to satiate the growling in Kyoko’s belly. Her father will slice up apples into as many pieces as he can and always slides her a few pieces, but it’s never enough. When the food they’re able to get doesn’t satisfy a stick-thin, pale Kyoko, she turns to books to stop her hunger, devouring words and drinking verse.

She stays at the library longer. At school she gets sideways glances and shakes of the head - probably people who think of her only as the “poor young girl whose father was excommunicated and it’s such a shame that we can’t, no,  _ don’t  _ do a thing to help her” - and at home she is left with near-empty pantries. People flit in and out of the library, and it’s all different faces of people who just want their books. They don’t notice her as she slips between shelves and settles down in a chair to read.

She starts venturing outside of the books she has at home. Kyoko spends hours leafing through books there. She doesn’t want fairytales anymore, though - at least not stories with happy endings. Since she’s only ten  years old and can’t do anything about her family starving and her father’s job gone she reads about people worse off than she is - she wants people who aren’t real to have spiraled as far or farther down than she has.

At first, her favorite story is Hamlet. Sometimes she has to pull up a dictionary to get what it means, but Kyoko figures it out anyways. She thinks about Ophelia, and her jaw always clenches at how the girl’s death is portrayed as her floating into the watery depths flower-strewn and peaceful. No, Kyoko thinks, someone drowning would go down kicking and screaming with waterlogged lungs, wouldn’t they? Because she feels like she’s drowning, and the water fills her lungs slowly as she chokes. It’s water that smells of starvation.

Kyoko also thinks about Hamlet, and how unfair things in the play are. It isn’t fair that Hamlet’s father died, leaving his son alone. It isn’t fair that Ophelia and Laertes lose a father. It isn’t fair that Hamlet has to do this for his father. It isn’t fair that he dies from the poison and his soul leaves for Heaven (or is it Hell) and Horatio is all alone in the end. 

Things aren’t fair, Kyoko learns. She learns that from the books.

She does read fairytales sometimes, but the one she finds herself reading again and again is the Little Match Girl. The books are matches for Kyoko to light, watching the flame flicker until she runs out. Sometimes she’ll see things in the matches - stories of vengeful princes and girls eating poison apples and knights that aren’t so chivalrous. But books can’t replace the food she so badly needs, and Kyoko knows that eventually the light from her matches will go out and she will be left with an afterimage of a thing that wasn’t very real to begin with.

* * *

Magic is real. That much she knows now.

She found it out when she made her wish, and learned a little more about it when she fought her first witch. Kyoko has Mami to guide her now - a fairy godmother with warm yellow eyes and a quiet smile. She’s the hero now, and she’s the one who’ll carve out the path to her story. Maybe hers won’t end in tragedy - the mermaid might meet her prince, the matchstick girl might live through the night. The flames roar in the fireplace and they aren’t going out anytime soon.

With the influx of people flooding into the church for her sermons, they have more time. They sit over dinner as Kyoko talks about the books she’s read, and they laugh and talk. The dining room is bathed gold with candlelight, and things are as they’re supposed to be. Kyoko tears into her chicken, and knows that as long as she continues her work fighting against the witches they will keep their happy ending. And she has people who can help her. She may be very young, but she can handle it.

More time means her father reading to her again. They’re reading the Sword and the Stone this time, but she’s purposely put off the rest of the books because she wants stories with happy endings. Let Arthur Pendragon sit happily on his throne as king of England, Kyoko decides, let him get his presents from his animal friends and rule with Kay and Merlin by his side. Let the Knights of the Round Table be in the distant future, but his family. Not by blood, maybe, but still his family.

“The Wart reminds me a little of you, Kyoko.” Her father ruffles her dark red hair.

“Whaddaya mean?” She sits up straight, shaking off her sleepiness.

“Well, your hearts are in the right place,” he tells her. “You want to do all the good you can in all the time you can, and you think of others first. You want people to be happy - remember how Wart asked if Kay could go on an adventure with him? Reminds me a little bit of you with Momo and your friends.”

Kyoko leans against her father, wrapping her arms around him in a hug. “You taught me a lot about how to do all the good I can. And you’re teaching other people how to as well.” They’re both working to make the world better in different ways, and with the existence of magic maybe the rest of the world can have a happy ending too.

He presses a kiss to his daughter’s forehead. “I’m so proud of you, Kyoko. I love you very much - don’t forget that.”

Kyoko cracks a smile. “I won’t. I love you too, Dad.”

* * *

They don’t read stories after he finds her.

He doesn’t say much to her after that, and the smells of a house first filled with the smell of starvation and then the smell of home-cooked meals is filled with the foul stench of alcohol. Her mother is a ghost now, a phantasm that either can’t or won’t listen to Kyoko. Momo is there, but not for long because she doesn’t understand yet. One day, Kyoko thinks to herself, Momo will understand and become a phantasm just like her parents did, too.

So she reads to herself those nights. There is food in her belly yet she still feels starved. Once more, Kyoko gorges herself on words. She finishes the Once and Future King one night, reading by the faint white glow of her night light. She doesn’t ask her parents to read to her anymore. She knows the response she’ll get.

Once more she only has a single source of matches to light things up. And she finds herself crying over the ending to the Once and Future King, and has to shut the book so she doesn’t wet the pages with her tears. She sobs till her chest feels like it might burst and her throat aches, and then presses her face into her pillow to muffle her sobs.

She is Mordred, she realizes. She has taken apart what she used to have bit by bit, till there is nothing left. Her father is Arthur, and while his reign was peaceful it wasn’t going to last forever. Kyoko should have realized that sooner.

Moonlight shines through her open window, and a balmy spring breeze makes half-dried tears feel cold on her face. They say that Arthur might return to England when he’s needed most, but she knows that her Camelot has long since collapsed and there’s not much to be salvaged from the debris and rubble scattered over the once grand kingdom.

Kyoko dreams again, but this time she knows that they are dreams - nothing more, nothing less.

* * *

The book is the only thing she takes with her when she finds her family again. She sees Momo, her mother, and then her father - the chair is kicked away, and she can hear the creaking of the scratchy rope swinging a little. The noise makes her want to vomit.

She doesn’t want to stay there for too long, and she doesn’t cry. She has nothing left to cry over. She is still there to fight witches. It doesn’t matter how many people are saved. There are the Grief Seeds, after all, and she needs those. Yes, it doesn’t matter how many perish. As long as she can live alone this won’t happen - it already has passed.

She throws the glass slipper back. She doesn’t need a fairy godmother anymore. She doesn’t want to go to ballrooms when she knows her carriage will turn back into a pumpkin in the end. She doesn’t want her gown to turn to rags again.

The one thing Kyoko takes with her is her book of fairy tales. It is just as dog-eared and run-down as she remembers it, and she tucks the book under her arms as she runs far away.

She doesn’t look back.

* * *

Sometimes, Kyoko opens the book. She skips past the faded ink of the table of contents and settles on a random story. There are times she hears her mother’s voice in her head, or her father’s deep and rumbling voice. She tears into her candy bar as she reads, hungry for both words she’d long forgotten and the snacks she has.

And she slips back into her room no matter where she sits, where the lights are dim but not too dim so she can’t see the words on paper. Her parents read to her and Momo, and she can make out the glow-in-the-dark stickers on her ceiling and the pile of stuffed animals Momo has.

Sometimes, even though her happy ending’s been rewritten, Kyoko finds herself home again.

**Author's Note:**

> i love all the girls, but kyoko specifically has been growing on me. i liked her from the beginning, but i think i'm slowly growing more attached to her because i'm starting to appreciate my own relationship with my family. my dad isn't christian, nor does his job involve religion, but the references to fairy tales and arthurian mythology are drawn from bedtime stories. we stopped at the ill-made knight, though - dad said i was eight and that it would be too sad for me. and it still is, even several years later when i'm a teenager.
> 
> thank you for reading this! take care~


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